
Everyone knows the old story about the space race: in the 1960s, Nasa needed to solve the problem of astronauts being able to write notes in space, so they spent millions developing a pen that could write in microgravity. The Soviets, the story goes, took pencils.
Most people also know this isn’t true. Pencil shavings, in the high-oxygen atmosphere of a spacecraft, are a fire hazard. The space pen was developed by a private company and sold to Nasa in a brilliant piece of marketing by the American businessman Paul Fisher.